Related work

The Nana project was inspired by some other projects, in particular:

• Anna - Anna stands for "Annotated Ada" where the programmer inserts various assertions into the code which can be automatically validated. To quote from the WWW Virtual Library entry on Anna:

  Anna is a language for formally specifying the intended behaviour of Ada programs. It extends Ada with various different kinds of specification constructs from ones as simple as assertions, to as complex as algebraic specifications. A tool set has been implemented at Stanford for Anna, including:

  1. standard DIANA extension packages, parsers, pretty-printers;
  2. a semantic checker;
  3. a specification analyser;
  4. an annotation transformer; and
  5. a special debugger that allows program debugging based on formal specifications

  All tools have been developed in Ada and are therefore extremely portable. Anna has thus been ported to many platforms. For more information send e-mail to "anna-request@anna.stanford.edu". Before down loading the huge Anna release, you may wish to copy and read some Anna LaTeX reports.

  Anna is available from: ftp://anna.stanford.edu/pub/anna
• Eiffel - the Eiffel programming language provides support in the language flexible assertion checking. To quote from the Eiffel page in WWW Virtual library:

  Eiffel is a pure object-oriented language featuring multiple inheritance, polymorphism, static typing and dynamic binding, genericity (constrained and unconstrained), a disciplined exception mechanism, systematic use of assertions to promote programming by contract, and deferred classes for high-level design and analysis.

• APP - Annotation PreProcessor. The APP was written by David S. Rosenblum and provides assertion checking functions for C and C++. It is implemented using a preprocessor wrapper around the C preprocessor and supports quantifiers and before/after state. See "A Practical Approach to Programming with Assertions" in Vol 21, No. 1, January 1995 of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering for an interesting paper describing APP. Unfortunately the APP tool doesn't seem to be freely available (I'm willing to be corrected on this). Note that any similarity between my examples and David's are due to morphic resonance.

Nana is essentially a poor mans implementation of some of these ideas which works for C and C++. Ideally in the best of all possible worlds you might want to look at Eiffel or in the military world Ada and Anna. If you use TCL/TK you might also be interested in Jon Cook's `AsserTCL' package.

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